TBR Reading Series Reading and Book Launch: featuring River Selby, author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire, and other readers TBA | P & T Knitwear NYC

Lives on Fire: A Short Film Series and Reading featuring debut author River Selby and their new memoir, HOTSHOT: A Life on Fire. This film series engages with themes of fire, burning, queer, trans, and nonbinary experiences, trauma, familial relationships, Indigenous and First Nations cultural practices, environmentalism, ecology, workplace gender dynamics, working class experiences, and meditation.

A reading with River Selby, author of the debut memoir Hotshot: A Life on Fire.

Author River Selby discusses their debut memoir, Hotshot: A Life on Fire, at Francie & Finch bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska.

River Selby joins Kelly Ramsey, author of Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, Dani Burlison and Margaret Elysia Garcia, editors and contributors to Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California's Fire Country, with Caroline Paul to moderate.

Browsers is proud to host Olympia born-and-bread author River (formerly Anastasia) Selby on Thursday, October 23 at 6:00 PM. Please join us upstairs as they speak on their memoir Hotshot: A Life on Fire.

By the time they were 19, Selby had been homeless, addicted to drugs, and sexually assaulted more than once. In a last-ditch effort to find direction, they applied to be a wildland firefighter. Soon immersed in the world of firefighting and its arcana—from specialized tools named for the fire pioneers who invented them, to the back-breaking labor of racing against time to create firebreaks—Selby began to find an internal balance. Then, after two years of ragtag contract firefighting, Selby joined an elite class of specially trained wildland firefighters known as hotshots.

Over the course of five fire seasons, Selby delves into the world of the people—almost entirely men—who risk their lives to fight and sometimes prevent wildfires. Marked out in a sea of machismo, Selby was simultaneously hyper visible and invisible, and HOTSHOT deftly parses the odd mix of camaraderie and rampant sexism they experienced on their fire crews, and how, when challenged, it resulted in a violent closing of ranks that excluded them from the work they’d come to love. Drawing on years of firsthand experience on the frontlines of fire, followed by years of research into the science and history of fire, HOTSHOT also reckons with our fraught stewardship of the land—how federal fire policy is maladapted to the realities of fire-prone landscapes and how it has led to ever more severe fire seasons.

HOTSHOT is a work of intimacy and authority, nimbly merging a personal journey of reinvention and self-acceptance with expert insight into the textured history of ecological systems and Indigenous land tending, the modern practices that have led to their imbalance, and the people who fight fire.